This war is probably the world’s greatest illustration that a condition of “preparation for defence” is apt to lead to war. Forty years of such preparation has developed in the peaceful scholarly German nation an oligarchy of swashbucklers who crowd women off the sidewalk and cherish an ambition to conquer the world.
More specific causes of the low condition of Germany are not far to seek. If a hundred portraits of each of the rulers of, say, the ten leading nations were culled at random from the leading illustrated publications, a due proportion being kept of the various functions in which the rulers were engaged when the pictures were taken, there is no reasonable doubt that the absolute rulers would be represented the greatest number of times in military dress—like savages in war paint, and that William of Germany’s proportion would be larger than that of any other ruler. The presidents of republican France and the United States would not appear in war paint at all, and the king of democratic England would so appear less often than the head of any other dynasty.
Of all alleged civilized rulers, William II has alone borne the barbarous title of “The War Lord,” yet before last August he never saw a battle. He was “The War Lord” simply because it was his delight to pose as such, and what a man poses, he wishes to become. Since 1870, and to some extent before, the Kaiser’s country has been, to a degree approached by no other in Europe, an armed camp. In Germany, gentleman and army-officer have been almost synonymous terms: no amount of learning, genius or eminence in any other direction has brought a man as high social consideration as eminence in the army. The army has been the dominant interest of the Emperor, and, despite the enormous industries, the dominant power in the eyes of the people—a power more recognized than the legislature and the courts. Among the aristocratic and would-be aristocratic classes, it has been the one career, and the one avenue to eminence. But in times of peace, promotion is slow: it is liveliest only when war kills off or wears out superiors. Hence in the German army the chief yearning—all the stronger for being suppressed for nearly half a century—has been for war: the daily toast at the officers’ messes has been for many years “Zum Tag!” Of such conditions as these, the natural outcome has been the barbarities in Brussels, Antwerp, and Louvain.
For these conditions of course neither the German people nor their Kaiser has been entirely to blame: everybody knows how, at the start, the conditions were forced upon them. But what pains have been taken to keep at the lowest terms their barbarizing influence, not to speak of doing away with it altogether? What has been the general attitude of Germany, under the Kaiser’s influence, toward the proposals instituted by the Tzar—sovereign of a far inferior people—for the development of machinery for international peace?
This war, in its murders and destructions, is probably the worst calamity the world has ever known. Yet it is doubtful whether the murders and destructions are the worst things about it: for it has, for the time being, turned a people long among the most admirable and lovable and peaceable in the world, into a nation of destroyers, and made some of their admirable qualities—their coolness, their patience, their energy, their system, their ingenuity, their coöperation, their patriotism, all of which were long among the chief agencies of the world’s progress, into the chief agencies for its misery and debasement.
But, with all the German’s old-time merits, there is no blinking the fact that the current of civilization which came through Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome does not flow through his veins. He came into civilization late, and he shows it despite the virtues Tacitus saw him bringing with him: he still holds the barbarities of a highly inflected speech, a highly centralized government, and a ruthless disregard of the finer amenities of both peace and war. But we repeat that, except as his barbarian warlike passions have been trained since the fifties, and now been specially aroused, the great virtues which he had evolved even when History first knew him, made him admirable and lovable, and when he has felt the consequences of his mistakes, will make him so again.
The obvious conditions would suggest, even to the visitor from another planet, that there must be two Germanys; and so there are—the Germany of industry and peace, and the Germany of idleness and war. The higher Germany—not the higher in the army or the state, but the higher in intellect and morals, even less than a generation ago was among the greatest examples of mankind. The lower Germany—baser though more brilliant—nurtures a nest of microbes, and they have entered into the blood of the higher, and made it mad.
One thing that has made possible this great tragedy is the survival of old ideas of high and low, which, like many other ideas, were once true, and in the progress of evolution have now become false—more destructively false in Germany than anywhere else in civilization. In all savage communities, the ruling class is apt to be the best. Evolution approaches equilibration—the beam of the scale approaches the level—by the arbitrary power of the upper class going down, and the capacity of the lower class rising up, until at last, we may hope all classes will be on a level. The scale of course oscillates until, if ever, equilibration shall be reached: the revolutionary movements at times place the lower classes in the ascendant, even make them for brief moments the rulers,—often very ridiculous and even destructive rulers, as in the French revolution, and the ascendancy of the silverites in the American congress. But the mistakes of the temporary rulers from the ignorant classes have been nothing beside the excesses of a Zenghis Khan, a Tamerlane, an Alexander, a Nero, a Henry the Eighth, a Napoleon, and a William II of Germany.
The claim that Germany is waging a war of defence is too thin to justify attention. The Kaiser’s responsibility for spreading the conflict is of course disputed by him and his supporters; but the thing has been brewing from the day the young Emperor, imitating the pirates and stage villains, pasted up his moustache farther than any other man’s to make himself look fierce. No man of peace or modesty ever hung out such a sign.
He has hardly ever made a speech without showing his megalomania, and placing his army first among his many interests; in agreements proposed for the promotion of peace, from the first meeting at The Hague, he has been the one to hang back; and he refused the arbitration suggested by Sir Edward Grey, which the other nations seemed ready to accept.